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That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
-George Bernard Shaw
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
-Susan Sontag
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
-Susan Sontag
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
-Susan Sontag
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Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
-Edward Steichen
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The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
-Edward Steichen
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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
-John Steinbeck
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
-Wallace Stevens
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-Alfred Stieglitz
From Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (Middleton, NY: Aperture, 1973)
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For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
-Gore Vidal
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Photography suits the temper of this age -- of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
-Edward Weston
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Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.
-Minor White
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A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
-Minor White
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No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.
-Minor White
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We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Books about Photography
